Cat's Eyes
by uccella
Summary: Talia/Gil vignette. Intimate moments, before the war.


Take some liberties with the GS Destiny timeline and enjoy some Captain/Chairman moments of intimacy.

* * *

Talia has long since forgotten how the affaire began.

It is not an affaire, per say. Their relationship is not illegitimate. Neither of them have anyone else. They are both married – and Talia hates this expression – to their jobs: Talia to the military, her Minerva, and he to his duty to the people, though duty is perhaps not the word she would always choose. They are not concealing anything from another loved one or betraying anyone's trust – except perhaps their own. But she has long been resigned to the term _affaire_. It seems appropriate, somehow. It seems reflected in the way Gilbert looks at her: with a hushed hunger for something that cannot be entirely satiated.

There was never any courting. No tentative steps, no testing of the water. Only sure and fast footwork, running headfirst into the crashing waves without even checking the temperature.

It was freezing, she later learned. This little dance they did was cold and fast. Except –

Except when it wasn't. Except when she was beneath him, coiling and uncoiling, warm and languorous. His glossy black hair would fall in waves over his face, and from behind the dark curtain his amber eyes would watch her, study her movements as though she was another mission, another tactical problem to be solved.

_Cat's eyes_, she would think, before his mouth would close over hers.

• *

Talia doesn't mind when he comes in late.

She doesn't ask him where he's been. He's the Chairman of the Supreme Council of PLANT – she could turn on any broadcast to see what function he has attended, what political manoeuvring he's engaged in, or with whom he's exchanged words. She is not interested in _that_ Gilbert.

She is interested in the one that enters her home as if to claim it, touching everything he drifts by, moving quietly and carefully but with stature that demands the room's attention. The only attention in the room is hers, and he has it fully – she thinks he must know this – and inevitably as he claims her space, he also claims her.

She has not put any restrictions on her home, set any boundaries. She figures if she did, he would glide right through them anyway.

So her space opens to him just as she does, and he settles here and there: leaving his imprints on the fabric of cushions, his fingerprints on the glass table, his scent in the silk sheets. He moves like water and yet everything seems to bend to him anyway, yielding to his touch. She is no different: as pliable to the sound of his honey voice as her body is to his ghosting touch.

She doesn't mind when he departs early, either, leaving his warmth in the soft depression of the mattress beside her so that when she wakes she imagines he has only just left, dissipating like a ghostly afterimage. Instead he is already flickering from the other side of the screen mounted on the wall, his liquid voice like an antidote to the masses he addresses from behind a podium. Perhaps every person on and off Earth recognizes him, she realizes. And yet somewhere in the core of this politician addressing civilization itself is the man who hours before only had eyes for her, and beneath whose caress she would tremble.

Wryly, she thinks: _Were I a ship, I would have sunk a long time ago._

• *

They don't make love as often as they used to. What once could never wait now waits too long and fades, her desires dulled by the world outside.

It's the war, she knows. Training takes everything out of her physically, and when she returns home at the end of the day only to see canvases of death flashing over the wall screen, she retreats perceptually, like a monk, into nothingness. How futile to try and turn off the war, she thinks – she is a soldier. War wakes her in the morning and in fits of terror, it puts her to sleep.

When he does come it is with an irreverence new to her. Where once he glided he now wheels around her, like a predator circling prey. Where his actions were more deliberate he now envelops her without question, as if she would float away were he not holding her down. She is even less verbal and he more physical, and because it has been so long it is all the more intense. She has not exchanged a word with him in hours but they do now, hushed and incoherent, because touch is the only language they ever really shared.

She likes to run her hands through his hair and pull it back, and when she does she catches glimpses of his face, the outlines of his features soft in the gloom. She wonders how his eyes remain unchanged while she sees the shadows of war creep darkly beneath hers. Yet his countenance is always familiar: his sharp eyes pierce even as his gaze is impenetrable, and his voice still pours over her like liquid gold.

As he finishes with her, she likes to pretend that the war is over, even though she knows it will claim them both.

_end._


End file.
